Transcript

He was a man with charisma. It was his charisma and his belief, self-belief, and belief in Buro Happold. There was no doubt about it, Buro Happold was going to be a major firm. He was just great fun. Full of endeavour, full of energy and good ideas. He was a hurricane really, had an aura about him, and I know that his students felt that way. Ted said ���I���m going to... I���ve had an invitation, an opportunity to start as a professor in Bath���s University.��� So, he said, but part of the conditions is he can start a little practice. I said ���look, I���d like to come with you.��� At some point he gives me a ring and I go up and visit him. And he tells me that he's been offered this professorship at Bath, and he thinks I ought to go with him. Well, he was always good at getting jobs and building teams. You know, two great things. Because of his energy and his chutzpah you know, his charisma, they had great confidence in him. Ted was the only one who went down to Bath who was going to draw a salary because he had the job at the university. Everybody else took this great leap of faith. Yeah. You know, and some of them had children. We all had to find houses and so on and so forth. I'm sure everybody's told you the story of how Ian had the first house in Saint James's Square in Bath, and everybody dossed there. We all set off every day to go down to 14 Gay Street, which was another five storey, slightly shabby building. One of the first architects that I met down there, came to visit the Buro one day when we had just started having all the renovations done and new electrics and heating, and I was there trying to type away and the plaster was coming down and he said ���how are you doing?��� I said, well, it's a little bit stressful. And he said ���Well, it may be, but you'll look back on this time and it will be a wonderful memory.��� And he was right, it was. The first thing I did was to make tables for us to work at. I took flush panel doors and bits of wood and dowels and so on. We'd set ourselves up being able to draw. We weren't using computers to draw. There was no computer CAD systems. It was quite exciting because we moved into a building which we were converting. I can remember the the wood shavings and stuff landing on our drawings as we were doing them, and you just brushed them away and kept going. There were no laptops and things. All the technology was it was all coming in, but most of our work had to be put on to just typewriters and copying machines. We moved down to Quiet Street. And it was during the time of the Diplomatic Club, which was one of the major projects that they had early on. Things started to grow, staff was growing, and we moved to Trim Street, and then Camden Mill. Ted had a good character, a good heart You know, he understood people. He could bring people together. He it wasn't aggressive in his work or, you know, he realised he was there because of people that he worked with. The spirit in Buro Happold was right. You know. The morning coffee was right, you know, it was the flexibility, you know, to make mistakes, providing you owned up to them. He was putting his preachings into practice. He always used to say, you know, that you should have as many diverse talents in a team that can possibly live together, you know. And another saying that you probably know about was that you should allow people to sing with their own beak. So he gave people a lot of authority. I didn���t know that one. You didn't know that? Oh, yes. People should be allowed to sing with their own beak. My first project was a thing called British Genius in Battersea Park. Which was a kind of exhibition thing, which was really quite nice actually. It was a lightweight structures, big mast tent. A lot of exhibition stuff underneath showing how good the British engineering and design was. The funny bit is its ongoing life. Somebody rings up - another engineer, because they were building an industrial area at Yanbu. They needed Prince Faisal, at the time, to come and open the project and they didn't have a suitable house. And could they have our tent? I did something like six or seven months in Jeddah putting this thing up. Which was quite a challenge because it was before the days of, well, before email. It was just about telex days. You couldn't even make a phone call to the UK without booking it umpteen hours in advance. So if anything went wrong, you're on your own. And it was a good time to make your own decisions. For my part, there's one project that stands out clearly, and that is Terry Ealey's project called the Wadi Hanifah. A historic wadi, adjacent to the plateau where Riyadh is built. It had become a rubbish dump and Terry was commissioned, along with others, to develop this into a park. People refer to it, I think globally as well, and actually we use it as an example of how you can regenerate water. Everything was done from a natural perspective. So it was about using fish and it was about using rocks to rehabilitate the water. When you went to the wadi after it had been built and regenerated, just the way people were interacting with it, it was a magnet and has changed the whole dynamic of the city for me. What Terry would probably say is his legacy for Buro Happold is Sabah Al Ahmad Sea City. It's an inland waterway, very different from what you get in terms of the Palms in Dubai. And instead of going out into the sea, we come into the desert creating these lagoons which have actually created close to 200km of extra coastline in Kuwait. I have a romantic love for the Munich Aviary. I think that is so beautiful, so light, so elegant. I remember going there. J��rg Gribl was the architect and he said it was structure like a cloud, which is a lovely description. So beautiful. And it was innovative in a sort of technological way. They used this crimp wire so that it wasn't pulled out of shape when it was curved over the supports. Michael Dickson worked on it and of course Frei Otto. And to me, it sort of exemplifies Ted's work with Frei Otto. It was the most creative and, I think, satisfying professional collaboration that Ted had. I'm quite proud of the Dome. We were told at one point that the dome shouldn't last beyond the Millennium Exhibition. And I said, you could do, you know, really cheap galvanising on the cables and it would save a bit of money. But, we've got it at the moment specified for aluminium zinc galvanising system, which lasted sort of five times as long. And I said, I don't propose to change it because I don't believe they���ll pull it down. When you arrive at the British Museum, you can walk through and go into the Great Court. Now I've stood just inside that door on many occasions, and almost everybody smiles when they walk through the door. Now to me, that is what a building should be able to do. And the light is the way it is because of what Tony McLaughlin did. All the glass has little white dots on it, and it limits the amount of energy that's coming into the space, but it still leaves specular light. And it's just a place of enjoyment. Ted was a great believer in methodology. He said, you know, an engineer is formed around a table. You're all sitting here around the table and somewhere there the correct solution will form. We were very lucky, you know, in terms of founding partners. We had some really great people, you know, Ted and Michael and and Terry and of course then we had Ian and Rod. Very different characters. But, you know, all great people. His Quaker faith was very important to him in how he approached people and how he approached his work. And this was very, very influential with Ted in setting up. He said, you know, that Buro Happold was set up as a partnership, and it was a fellowship before it became an organisation.